I’ve been using a Canon A570 IS for a couple of years, a perfectly serviceable compact camera I got for around $100.  It takes fine pictures as long as the light is good, but I’ve been envious of my friends who took better pictures than I could when the light isn’t so good.  So I started looking for a new camera.

At first, I thought I was going to get something like the Canon SX10 IS, a bulky camera with a 20x zoom and lots of megapixels.  But I stalled after getting bait-and-switched, and a couple of months of casual research later I realized that wasn’t the camera I was looking for.

I’ve never cared much whether a camera has removable lenses, and that always seemed to be the big advantage of expensive SLR cameras.

I now think that the big advantage of expensive SLR cameras is not the fancy removable lenses, but the huge-ass sensor.  SLRs have a sensor that’s about ten times the size as compact cameras, which theoretically means it can can get ten times as much light in the same picture.

It seemed to me that megapixels should be a good indicator of a camera’s resolution, but when I did comparisons with my camera at 2 megapixels and 7 megapixels, the quality of the pictures was almost indistinguishable.  Yes, the higher resolution image has four times as many dots, but the extra dots are mostly crap.

I’ve taken to shooting at only 2 megapixels, because it reduces my time uploading pictures from the camera, and the picture quality isn’t any different.  (Below 2 megapixels I started to see the difference.)

SLR cameras are expensive (maybe $300 at a bare minimum), and what’s worse, near as I can tell, they’re a total money pit.  Once you get one, apparently you start having inexplicable urges to buy fancy new lenses, and flashes, and tripods, and who knows what else.

More tomorrow.

One thing I like about the Mini is that it has two tiny monitor ports, and each will drive a separate 24 inch monitor.

I always tell people to spend more on their monitor than they think they should, and less on the CPU, since they’ll probably have the monitor longer.

I’ve been using an Apple 24 inch that I bought five years ago for $999 when the price dropped.  When I got the Mini, I took the opportunity to add a second 24 inch monitor — a refurbished HP ($219 including shipping from MacConnection.) I also needed an adapter to go from the mini-displayport to HDMI, and an HDMI cable, but I got those for something like $10 from buy.com.

It’s nice having two big monitors, though I tend to lose my mouse a little more than I used to, and my hotspot corners are often too far away to be as convenient as they were.

I still covet a 30 inch monitor, but it’ll probably be a few years yet.

A month or two ago, my trusty dual-G5 stopped working, so I replaced it with a Mac Mini.  I had given some thought to maybe getting a Psystar clone, for its quad-coriness, but I chickened out.

Turns out my G5 just had a RAM DIMM go bad, so it works fine, with 2 gigs instead of 4.

I like the Mini, though it does seem to bog get sluggish when it runs out of memory, which it seems to do quite easily, even though 4 gigs (It was kind of a pain to put in the memory, too) should be sufficient to run the dozen or so apps I’m usually running.  Why every app thinks it needs an entire gig of virtual memory I can’t imagine.

OK, I’ve taken a long break for some reason. I’m back! Anybody still there?